As I turned down Lãn Ông street, two things struck me. The first was how quiet it is compared to the rest of Hanoi’s Old Quarter: The flow of motorbikes is less incessant, the lights a notch dimmer. The second was the smell: somewhat musty, sometimes sweet, and unmistakably herbal.

I was on Vietnam’s “traditional medicine street.” Shophouses all along the row were stacked with herbs and medicines. Dark-colored ointments filled glass bottles. Red ginseng and artichoke tea was packed in cardboard boxes. Plastic bags were stuffed with monk fruit, lotus seeds, and strips of bark. But I had come in search of something a bit more elusive: rhino horn.

Although banned in Vietnam, rhino horn is still available for purchase—if you know how to find it. The Southeast Asian nation is the largest consumer of rhino horns in the world, and the illicit trade is so strong that it’s fueling a poaching crisis in South Africa, where more than 1,000 rhinos have been killed in the past year alone. In one of the most recent arrests, police seized two frozen tigers cubs, four lion pelts, and nearly 80 pounds of rhino horns in raids conducted across the country’s capital, Hanoi.

The Vietnamese government is now facing fierce international pressure to put an end to the crisis, before rhino populations are devastated beyond repair. But weeding out rhino-horn consumers is a challenge. A piece of horn used to be sought after by older Vietnamese folk, who would visit traditional medicine shops in Lãn Ông street and elsewhere for that special ingredient to add to herbal tonics. But these days, it’s wealthy young businessmen driving the demand—and their interest in horns lies beyond its purported medicinal benefits.

* * *

Since 2007, the nonprofit organization Traffic has been studying rhino-horn-consumption patterns in Vietnam. Traffic’s last big survey, involving 720 people in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh, was conducted in 2013, when they identified four main groups driving the demand: those who believe rhino horn can cure cancer, young mothers who use it to treat feverish children, the affluent who view it as a “health and hangover-curing tonic,” and rich businessmen who give it to superiors to get into their good books.

A more recent report, published by the International Trade Center in April, whittles down these observations even further. Following interviews with 249 users, ITC concluded that “the main rhino horn buyers were rich people who bought rhino horn for use in family or to give to other people as gifts.”

Vietnam sees more rich people as each year goes by. Frequently referred to as “Asia’s next tiger” because it has one of the fastest growing economies in the world, Vietnam boasts a GDP that has steadily increased by 7 percent every year since 1990. The number of ultra-high net worth individuals—those with more than $30 million of investable assets—has grown 320 percent in the past 16 years, a rate quicker than either China or India.

There are now stories of Vietnam’s nouveau riche reveling in their newfound wealth at “rhino-wine associations,” gatherings where people down drinks of rhino horn powder mixed with alcohol or water. There are also tales of parties where powdered horn is snorted like cocaine. The reality may not be quite so wild: “It’s not a drink to enjoy by itself, but it’s used as a tonic to prevent or cure a hangover,” says Madelon Willemsen, the head of Traffic’s Vietnam office. “They say, ‘Hey, I’ve got some rhino horn, here you go so we can get pissed tonight and you won’t have a hangover tomorrow.’”

Willemsen shared some testimonials her team collected from the rhino-horn users they surveyed. In one, a man recounted receiving a small piece of rhino horn from a friend who was concerned about how frequently he had to drink while entertaining clients for work. The man ground up the horn using a special ceramic bowl, dissolving some of the powder in a glass of water before refrigerating it. He consumed the concoction the morning after a big drinking session. “I felt very cool and much better, and was able to have another party and drink alcohol with guests that very afternoon,” the man recalls.

* * *

Rhino horns were first described in traditional-medicine pharmacopeias more than 1,800 years ago—but their prescribed usage had nothing to do with alleviating a bad hangover. The horns were “commonly used for febrile seizures, very high fevers and for internal heat that affects the blood,” says Steve Given, who teaches traditional Chinese medicine at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

One of traditional medicine’s central tenets is the balance of yin and yang within the body. Rhino horns are believed to have “cooling” properties, which reportedly makes them well-suited for reducing temperatures and removing bodily heat. “But the research is very, very limited as to whether it can actually reduce fevers,” Given says. That’s unsurprising, since most of what makes up rhino horn, despite its majestic appearance, is keratin—the same non-therapeutic protein found in human hair and nails.

Despite being mentioned in ancient medical texts, rhino horns “never played an important part in traditional medicine,” says Michele Thompson, a history professor at Southern Connecticut State University and the author of Vietnamese Traditional Medicine: A Social History. “The use of it is essentially a fad.”

In the early 1990s, rhino horn was just a blip on the radar. Demand was low, thanks to various trade bans implemented within Asia and the removal of rhino horns from an official list of traditional medicines. But appetite swelled suddenly in 2008, with prices skyrocketing as high as $100,000 per kilogram, following rumors that rhino horn had miraculously vanquished a retired politician’s cancer.

Since then, that speculation has been squashed, and the fanfare over the horn’s supposedly healing powers has died down—a shift that’s reflected in the shops on Lãn Ông street today. Most of the shopkeepers I approached to ask for rhino horn shook their heads vigorously and waved me away. Only one, out of 10 I asked, said she might have something for me—if I could shell out $3,500 for 100 grams worth. I would have to give her a call tomorrow morning and come back at 10 a.m. to collect it. It all sounded very suspicious to me.

“It’s an ideal commodity to give to a superior or a colleague, or to be used as a bribe to get work done.”

“When you go to traditional medicine shops, you need to know someone,” says Trang Nguyen, the founder of the conservation charity WildAct. “But it’s easy to get rhino horn today through Facebook, online forums, or e-commerce websites.” This switch from physical to virtual stores is perhaps emblematic of the changing face of rhino horn consumers—from more conservative older folk who believe in the power of herbal remedies to upwardly mobile, tech-savvy youths who believe in the power of money.

* * *

Traffic understands this trend well. For their latest campaign, launched in 2014, the group chose to target urban businessmen ranging from 35 to 50 years old. At crowded places such as the airport and on city billboards, Traffic displayed glossy black posters of well-dressed men in slick suits, with taglines like “Character comes from within.” The campaign is referred to as the Chi initiative; it refutes the notion that rhino horns confer power or status, invoking instead the Asian concept of chi, the energy force said to be present in every living thing. “It’s all about strength coming from within, and not from a piece of horn,” explains Willemsen, who says the campaign has reached more than five million of its target audience.

Her team plans to launch the next phase of the Chi initiative at the end of the year. They’ll continue to work with the government’s Central Committee for Propaganda and Education, but this time the focus of attention will be turned inwards: to government officials. In a separate project slated for the coming months, the World Bank will also seek to reduce rhino-horn usage among Vietnam’s public servants.

The government itself has taken steps to remediate the illicit trade: In 2012, it signed an agreement with South Africa to better control horn trafficking, and in 2014, it signaled Vietnam’s commitment to tackle wildlife crime by signing, along with 45 other countries, the London Declaration on Illegal Wildlife Trade. But translation of policy into practice has been slow—no illegal traders have been prosecuted to date, and a new penal code meting out harsher punishment for trafficking has been indefinitely delayed since July last year.

“When rhino horn is used as a status symbol, it’s an ideal commodity to give to a superior or a colleague, or to be used as a bribe to get work done,” says Willemsen. “The government is very clearly implicated in maintaining this whole trade.”

About the Author

Most Popular

Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”